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The U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced last week its intent to auction off 86 parcels comprising more than 36,000 acres of our public lands to the oil and gas industry for drilling and fracking. These lands are located along Colorado’s Front Range, including in Weld, Adams, Arapahoe, Morgan, and Logan Counties. They also include portions of the Pawnee National Grassland, which is already being heavily impacted by oil and gas development.

Click here or on the image below to view our interactive map of these where these fracking leases are located in relation to Front Range communities and other key areas.

Map of oil and gas lease parcels proposed for auction by the Bureau of Land Management in May 2015.

The development also stands to destroy drinking water and diminish the flows of the South Platte River. As WildEarth Guardians pointed out in a recent objection to the Forest Service’s plans to allow oil and gas leasing under the Pawnee National Grassland, oil and gas drilling and fracking is poised to permanently destroy 1.4 million acre-feet of water, nearly half a trillion gallons (see objection at p. 19).

But the real kicker is the amount of greenhouse gases that would be unleashed.

Although the Bureau of Land Management has not been entirely transparent yet on the full amount of carbon pollution expected to be released, an estimate by the Forest Service found that development of leases on the Pawnee national Grassland would unlock 127,440 tons of carbon dioxide and 6,608 tons of methane. Given that methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide, this amounts to nearly 650,000 tons of carbon in total slated to be released annually because of expanded fracking just on the Pawnee.

And this doesn’t even take into account the carbon pollution that would be released from natural gas processing, oil transport and refining, and of course the eventual combustion of all the oil and gas slated to be produced from these leases.

WildEarth Guardians is fighting to stop this tide of fossil fuel destruction and keep the Front Range safe and healthy. We’ve turned the heat up on both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, exposing how disastrous their oil and gas plans would be. Sadly, they’re not yet listening. With the Bureau of Land Management’s latest notice, we have a chance to appeal and, hopefully set things straight. Stay tuned for updates.

Oil drilling and fracking viewed from near the Pawnee Buttes on the Pawnee National Grassland. If the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have their way, more of this will be showing up along Colorado’s Front Range.

The climate hypocrisy of the U.S. Department of the Interior reached new and absolutely bizarre lows this past week.

On Monday, Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior Department, helped unveil the largest solar farm on our public lands, commending the project for taking “action on climate change” and helping “move our nation toward a renewable energy future.”

The plaudits were well founded. After all, an estimated 300,000 tons of carbon stand to be displaced annually by the 550 megawatt solar farm, not an insignificant amount.

Two days later, however, Sally Jewell completely obliterated this climate progress.

In an oil and gas lease sale in Colorado, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management auctioned off 15,424 acres of public lands for drilling and fracking in the Little Snake Field Office in northwest Colorado.

Touted as an economic success, what the Bureau of Land Management failed to acknowledge is that development of these leases would fuel an increase in carbon dioxide (i.e., CO2) emissions to more than 800,000 tons annually just in the Little Snake Field Office. The chart below, taken from the agency’s own environmental analysis, plainly shows the projected increase.

Air emission increases projected in the Bureau of Land Management’s Little Snake Field Office of western Colorado (taken from p. 23 of the agency’s analysis).

That’s not the worst of it. The chart above also shows that methane emissions (i.e., CH4) from oil and gas development would increase to 19,247 tons annually. Given that methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide, that amounts to more than 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

When everything is said and done, we’re looking at a decision by the Interior Department that will increase carbon emissions by more than 2 million tons annually.

The net carbon increase is actually 2,184,229 tons annually. No climate benefits will be remotely reaped by the Interior Department’s solar project.

And as if this wasn’t bad enough, this increase doesn’t even take into account the carbon emissions that will result from the burning of the produced oil and gas. All told, we’re taking about a major carbon setback.

So much for the benefits of solar, so much for climate progress at the Interior Department, and so much for moving our nation toward renewable energy.

Oh, and as for the claimed economic success of the Bureau of Land Management’s oil and gas lease sale? Taking into account the value of carbon, which could be as high as $220 per ton, we’re looking upwards of $480 million in costs. That’s a far cry from the $319,113 in revenue reported by the agency.

The worst of it is, more oil and gas leasing and even more carbon pollution is on the horizon.

The climate hypocrisy of the Interior Department seemingly knows no bounds. For our nation and our future, hopefully this will change and change soon. We can’t save the climate by selling more oil and gas.

Public lands oil and gas development approved by the Department of the Interior is destroying climate progress.

Check out our new interactive photo tour map of fracking in the Rocky Mountain West!

Click on the image below and see firsthand what fracking is looking like on the ground, what’s it’s doing to the iconic American West, and what’s at stake if we can’t overcome this onslaught from the oil and gas industry. If you really want to dive in, download the .kml file, open it up in Google Earth, and explore away (and by the way, for the more GIS minded, Google Earth Pro–which comes with way more data handling capabilities–is now free).

The vast majority of oil and gas development occurring in the Rocky Mountain West is happening on public lands. Although our public lands are an immense national treasure, they are sadly being industrialized. Worse, this development is fueling unprecedented releases of greenhouse gases, including from methane leaks. WildEarth Guardians is working to keep our public lands frack-free in order to safeguard the climate and protect our future.

This is a work in progress, we’ll keep posting photos as we get ‘em and refining the map as we go. In the meantime, enjoy!

Even as scientists are confirming that it’s time to keep fossil fuels in the ground, the U.S. Department of the Interior continues to open the door for extensive coal, oil, and gas development on our public lands, fueling unchecked carbon pollution at belligerently reckless rates.

The latest step backward occurred earlier this week as Interior’s Bureau of Land Management just gave itself a big pat on the back for approving thousands of new drilling permits and offered to lease nearly 6 million acres of public lands to the oil and gas industry for fracking.

The Bureau was so zealous, they gloat that they offered drilling permits and leasing opportunities “in excess of industry demand.”

Flaring, where the oil and gas industry purposefully burns off natural gas while producing oil, is the ultimate waste. Here, flaring at a fracking site on public lands in northwestern New Mexico was condoned by the Bureau of Land Management. Photo by Mike Eisenfeld.

In other words not only is the Bureau of Land Management meeting 100% of industry demands, they’re actually trying to give away even more.

It doesn’t end there. Last month, Interior reaffirmed its belief that coal is an “important part of our domestic energy portfolio,” offering new guidance to make leasing and mining more “efficient” and “certain” for industry.

Certainly, the new guidance is meant to ensure the American public gets a fair return on coal, especially where it’s exported, and it is likely to spur higher prices for federal coal leases and higher royalties. However, there’s an ominous omission. Nowhere has Interior signaled its intent to ensure carbon costs are factored into the valuation of coal.

It’s a simple concept. Carbon has a price. If unleashed from the ground (in the form of oil, gas, or coal), that price becomes a cost borne by our economy in the form of the destruction wrought by climate change. Those costs can add up, erasing any economic benefits otherwise reaped by the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

In the case of publicly owned coal, all signs indicate that carbon costs are, in fact, adding up and overriding any economic benefits. As reported by our friends at Greenpeace, while a ton of federal coal is brining in $1.03 per ton in revenue, it’s yielding carbon costs of between $22 and $237.

Interior’s new guidance, while providing greater clarity and direction around the valuation of publicly owned coal, continues to turn a blind eye to carbon costs, filling industry’s coffers at our expense.

Ensuring a fair return from coal sales is certainly laudable, but the reality is, no return can ever be fair if it doesn’t fully compensate the American public for the climate damage caused by unleashing more carbon.

Now, more than ever, Interior should be exercising massive restraint when it comes to development of fossil fuels on our public lands. Sadly, they’re not. The list of new coal, oil, and gas projects slated for approval in the coming months continues to swell. Here’s just a sampling of what’s in the queue:

A new coal lease in southern Wyoming that would expand the Jim Bridger mine and extend the life of the Jim Bridger coal-fired power plant;

Another new coal lease in the Powder River Basin of Montana that would expand the Rosebud mine and extend the life of the Colstrip coal-fired power plant; and

To top it all off, a proposal to lease nearly 1,000 acres of lands for fracking in Idaho, the first time the Bureau of Land Management has approved fracking in this majestic western state.

And this is just a fraction of what’s planned for approval in the next year. It’s like a tsunami of carbon threatening to be unleashed.

55,000 acres of public lands are slated to be auctioned off for fracking in southern Utah. The prospect of more fossil fuel development portends disaster both for our climate and our public lands.

Of course, with Sally Jewell, the Secretary of the Department of Interior, actively advocating for more fracking (and even dismissing the notion that fracking should be banned or otherwise curtailed), perhaps there’s little chance of a shift.

Fracking in Colorado proved deadly last week with the death of one and injuries of two other Halliburton workers at a frack job in Weld County. While a dramatic loss of life like this quickly made national headlines, Colorado residents near fracking sites continue to wonder whether they are being subject to less visible but just as deadly air and water pollution from fracking; pollution that will eventually strike in the form of cancer, birth defects, and respiratory disease.

Concerns like these have led to a spate of local initiatives, including several ballot measures, seeking to rein in fracking. Bolstered by findings that oil and gas development can pose immense risks to public health and safety, including recent findings that fracking operations release seven times more cancer-causing benzene emissions than previously estimated, these initiatives succeeded in putting communities first.

Yet while local communities have asserted their rights to defend their residents, they’ve also faced oil and gas industry lobbying and lawsuits aiming to turn back efforts at local control.

To fully defend local communities’ rights to protect themselves from the oil and gas industry, citizens in 2014 proposed a Colorado Right to Local Self-Government Amendment to the state constitution. Sensing a serious threat to their bottom line, however, the industry and Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper negotiated a deal that removed the amendment from the November ballot.

That deal resulted in the creation of a 21-person Oil and Gas Task Force, which was charged with recommending a set of statutory and regulatory changes to reduce the dangers of fracking to local communities. While welcomed by the oil and gas industry and the politicians they support, it has yet to be seen whether the Task Force can truly keep families and communities safe from fracking.

WildEarth Guardians decided that if the Task Force were truly to succeed, it needed a clear set of standards to measure progress. To that end, today we released a “Test for Success” for the Task Force. You can read the report here, but in a nutshell, we believe that any set of recommendations by the Task Force must include the four following elements:

• A right to know what chemicals frackers are using near communities and full disclosure from the oil and gas industry and state regulators,

• Safety triggers for pollution violations, which ensure that fracking is shut down when air, water, and other health standards are not being met,

• Three strikes and you are out for the oil and gas industry’s worst repeat bad actors, and

• The ability for local communities to step in when the state fails to enforce its own rules.

Overall, these recommendations are incredibly straightforward and are simply about putting public health and safety first. With reports underscoring the extreme risks of fracking, the recommendations are all the more reasonable.

“Any deal that does not protect our families and communities from fracking is not a compromise, but a failure.”

Check out the report for more details on these key principles, but more importantly provide your own input to the Task Force by emailing it to ogtaskforce@state.co.us. You also have a right to provide live public testimony at Task Force meetings. Their meeting schedule is here.

The bottom line is that if Governor Hickenlooper’s Task Force is to succeed, they need to hear from us. Whether they pass or fail is up to them, but unless we make clear our expectations, we can’t effectively grade their efforts.

For the sake of Colorado, we hope the Task Force lives up to these recommendations. However, if Governor Hickenlooper won’t defend basic principles such as the right to know and the need to empower local communities to enforce laws and regulations, it will clearly signal that citizen’ ballot initiatives need to be aggressively renewed.

Ultimately, this isn’t about whether fracking is good or bad, it’s about whether Colorado is going to be protected. The challenge is upon Governor Hickenlooper’s Task Force and we eagerly look forward to assessing whether or not they rise to the occasion.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency yesterday released its annual report on greenhouse gas emissions from the nation’s largest sources of pollution, revealing that we still have enormous progress to make in cutting carbon.

The big bombshell was that in 2013, greenhouse gas emissions actually increased. That’s right, increased. Not only that, but the increase was tied to increased coal burning.

It’s a shameful reminder of how the fossil fuel industry continues to dig our nation deeper into climate debt. With the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calling for a 40-70% reduction in carbon emissions below 2010 levels by mid-century, the last thing we need is an increase in emissions. It underscores that the fossil fuel industry’s resistance to limiting its pollution needs to be countered more fiercely than ever if we have any hope of making progress.

In other words, the world’s leading body of climate scientists say that one ton of methane equals 86 tons of carbon dioxide.

For EPA’s report, it means that estimates of carbon dioxide equivalency associated with methane are more than half a billion metric tons too low, an error of 70%. The EPA may be correct that there was a reduction in methane since 2011, but with such grossly inaccurate emissions reported, it seems like the hole we’re trying to dig out of is just getting deeper (this is confirmed by the latest studies finding that more fracking for gas not only won’t reduce carbon emissions, but will also undermine renewable energy).

Total methane emissions reported by EPA in 2013 and carbon dioxide equivalency based on a global warming potential of 25 and 86. The difference is more than half a billion tons of carbon.

Another bombshell is that underground coal mine methane emissions increased by nearly 25% between 2012 and 2013. The industry reported methane emissions equal to 41 million metric tons of carbon in 2013 (of course, with a global warming potential of 86, it would actually be more than 141 million metric tons).

No matter how you slice it, though, the data shows that coal mines are responsible for nearly 20% of all methane emissions in the U.S., a staggering figure.

In case you’re wondering, where these gassy coal mines are located, the majority are in Appalachia, but a few mines in the West–namely the San Juan mine in northwestern New Mexico, the Westridge mine in Utah, and Arch Coal’s West Elk mine in Colorado–made the top 20. The top emitter, the Walter Energy mine in Alabama, reportedly released nearly 5 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That’s more than an average coal-fired power plant. Here’s the full list of gassy mines >>

More than anything, the latest greenhouse gas reporting data confirms that we can’t afford to delay carbon reductions. It’s why last week, WildEarth Guardians joined a coalition of organizations in calling on the Obama Administration to stay firm in its commitment to curtail methane from oil and gas operations, and it’s why we’re digging in more aggressively than ever on our challenges to more coal mining and burning, and more fracking, in the American West.

We have major challenges ahead, but also major opportunities. It’s time to step it up.

The San Juan Generating Station in northwestern New Mexico is fueled by the San Juan coal mine, one of the top emitters of coal mine methane in the United States. WildEarth Guardians just filed an opening brief in federal court to stop an expansion of this mine.

The report coincides with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recent release of ozone data for the years 2011-2013 and a recent statement from agency staff that federal ozone limits–now set at 0.075 parts per million–should be strengthened to between 0.070 parts per million and 0.060 in order to effectively protect public health. The agency is currently under court order to promulgate new ambient air quality standards for ozone in 2015.

The revelations piqued our curiosity about the broader impacts of stronger health standards for ozone in the American West. Taking recently posted data from the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped out which counties in the west are violating current ozone air quality standards and which counties would be in violation of stronger ozone standards, depending on where they’re ultimately set. As the map below shows, the clean air landscape of the west stands to change dramatically. More importantly, what the map below shows is that areas throughout the west are already experiencing unhealthy levels of smog.

Western U.S. Counties Violating Current and Proposed Ozone Air Quality Standards

The landscape stands in stark contrast to what the Environmental Protection Agency found in 2012. As the map below shows, only a handful of areas in the west were violating ozone limits and designated “nonattainment” (a nonattainment designation under the Clean Air Act spurs a mandatory clean up). Effectively, only parts of central and southern California, the Phoenix metro area in Arizona, the Denver metro area of Colorado, and a portion of western Wyoming were deemed to have unhealthy smog levels.

Based on more recent data, it appears that a number of new areas are violating current standards, including Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and northwest Colorado and northeastern Utah. More importantly, it appears that under the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed standards, the number of areas likely to be designated nonattainment would be greatly expanded, including areas in every state except Montana. Put another way, the American West is facing a serious health crisis and an unprecedented smog clean up challenge.

Not exactly what you would expect for a region renowned for its big skies and clean air.

The big question, though, is what is the cause of this burgeoning smog problem? While California has its unchecked urban development, cars, trucks, and industrial agriculture, in the interior west, booming oil and gas drilling and fracking is a key driver. In fact, earlier this year, we put together a map showing the overlap between active oil and gas wells and areas likely to violate the Environmental Protection Agency’s new ozone standards. The overlap is uncanny.

Overlap between potential ozone nonattainment areas and active oil and gas wells in the western U.S.

The reason for this overlap is due to the fact that oil and gas drilling and fracking operations are huge sources of volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides, which are key ozone forming pollutants. Take the Uinta Basin of northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado. Recent studies found that oil and gas operations in this rural region release as much volatile organic compound pollution as 100 million cars, an absolutely shocking amount of pollution. In Colorado, even with the adoption of recent rules to limit pollution, oil and gas operations are still predicted to release 64% of all volatile organic compounds by 2018. Even in an urban region like Denver, oil and gas operations are projected to release more than 60% of all smog forming compounds, far more than all the cars and trucks in the area.

Even in areas without high ozone levels, drilling and fracking is filling the atmosphere with immense amounts of pollution. Most recently, the Western Regional Air Partnership reported that oil and gas operations in the Bakken shale region of North Dakota stand to release 367,000 tons of volatile organic compounds by 2015. That’s equal to the amount released annually from 27 million cars (according to the Environmental Protection Agency, an average car releases 27.33 pounds of volatile organic compounds annually). This is in a region with a population of less than a million.

Certainly, in other parts of the West, like in Nevada, Salt lake City, Washington, and Oregon, the challenge has more to do with increasing population and urban development. More people means more cars, more trucks, etc. But whether linked to fracking or population, the fact is that the western United States is going to have to come to terms with the need to keep growth in check.

The looming smog crisis in the American West presents an opportunity to get it right for our health and future. Without a doubt, we should be alarmed at the prospect of such a vast amount of the region falling into violation of ozone health limits. However, the solution isn’t to bemoan the challenge, it’s to embrace it.

Its time for all states in the west to start taking steps to limit fossil fuel pollution, especially from fracking, and to keep growth and urban development in check. Our goal everywhere should be to keep the west smog-free.